Modern Ritual Research Articles

Connecting Through Dance: Understanding Conscious Clubbing Event Experiences.

Individuals abstaining from alcohol consumption frequently find themselves in contexts encouraging consumption, with limited alternative social interaction opportunities. Conscious clubbing events exclude alcohol and drugs, possibly providing valuable social connections, but little is known about event benefits. Twelve conscious clubbing event attendees and facilitators aged 25-55 from across Europe participated in semi-structured photo-elicitation interviews, which were analysed using thematic analysis. Findings suggested that conscious clubbing appears to enhance health, healing and growth, aiding recovery from substance dependency and trauma. Positioned as a modern ritual, symbolic and ritualistic preparations and experiences promoted storytelling and self-discovery. Connecting through synchronised but unchoreographed movement, participants engaged in powerful journeys and transformative experiences detached from life constraints. Inclusive digital and face-to-face conscious clubbing communities provided a sense of meaning and belonging away from substance use pressures and harms, particularly for those marginalised within society. Findings provide important and in-depth insights, including novel harm prevention implications. Future work should consider participatory barriers, event sustainability and misconceptions to increase event availability and participation.

Review: Bangkok Utopia: Modern Architecture and Buddhist Felicities, 1910–1973

Review: <i>Bangkok Utopia: Modern Architecture and Buddhist Felicities, 1910–1973</i>

Reading Diplomacy across the Archives

This essay undertakes a cross-cultural interpretation of Giles Fletcher the Elder’s diplomatic mission to Muscovy (1588–89). It brings Fletcher’s official report on his embassy to the court of Emperor Fyodor in conversation with its Russian counterpart, in addition to placing these documents in the multifaceted context of early modern Anglo-Russian diplomatic ritual. Although Fletcher’s mission has always attracted the attention of scholars in different disciplines, it has not really been considered in light of diplomatic history. Meanwhile, both the English and Russian records of Fletcher’s embassy are preoccupied with diplomatic ritual, dedicating ample space to the choreography of official meetings, status symbols, gifts, acts of consumption, and corporeal semiotics. This essay examines two instances of breakdown in diplomatic protocol associated with Fletcher’s embassy: the alleged misuse of the emperor’s title by the English diplomat and the rejection of Elizabeth’s gifts by the Russian ruler. Focusing on the discrepancies between the English and Russian accounts of these frictions, the essay argues that the English embassy of 1588–89 was marked by a greater complexity and ambiguity regarding its strategies, tactics, objectives, successes, and failures than is often realized.

Love, Custom & Consumption: Valentine’s Day in England c. 1660–1830

ABSTRACT This article represents the first dedicated study of Valentine’s Day in England over the long eighteenth century. It argues that the years from c. 1660 to 1830 were central to the refashioning of the celebration as a modern ritual. During this shift, older customs such as lotteries were superseded by new traditions such as the exchange of valentine cards, with the commercialisation of festivities fuelling a consequent boom in homemade cards. By charting how a folk tradition evolved with the rise of consumer society, the article illuminates how commercial culture can augment, challenge – and ultimately change – material practices of love.

La Gran Batalla Electoral. La evolución del cliché fotográfico del voto a principios del siglo XX en Chile

El presente artículo describe la relación entre la práctica electoral y su representación en la en el contexto de una incipiente cultura de masas. Para ello, hemos seleccionado una lista de fotoreportajes publicados en revistas ilustradas chilenas de la época (1903-1920), en los que analizamos las continuidades y discontinuidades en las formas de representación del ritual moderno del voto. De esta forma, se observa cómo el uso de ciertos clichés forma parte de una estrategia de representación periodística de las elecciones que colabora con el trabajo de legitimación del voto como principal ceremonial republicano. Este artículo da cuenta de dos procesos simultáneos: por un lado, se trata de la representación de la expansión del derecho de sufragio y, por otro, de cómo las imágenes impresas asumen como propio el desafío de democratizar la sociedad a partir de las imágenes.

Refracting Affects: Affect, Psychotherapy, and Spirit Dis-Possession.

The notion of affect has generated much confusion in anthropology given its focus on that which seems to escape our language. The evanescent features of affects have irritated many anthropologists who consider affect theory as an empirically weak or esoteric hermeneutics. In this article, I respond to these critiques by developing an anthropology of therapy that foregrounds the role of affects. My intent is to explore the possible contribution of affect theory to medical and psychological anthropology. I draw from my ethnography on couple's therapy in Argentina to suggest that we cannot understand therapeutic efficacy if we focus only on language and discourse. I ask what it means to regard affects as late modern spirits and take psychotherapy as a modern ritual of "affect dispossession." I propose to ask how affects, like spirits, can haunt our present rendering our lives barely livable. Focusing on a session of therapy in Buenos Aires, I describe how a therapist channels the spirit of impasse that colonizes the lives of her patients. Developing an enchanted hermeneutics, I engage with Eve Sedgwick's call for an other-than-paranoid social theory by engaging the imagination as an important organ of perception in the medical anthropology of affects.

The journey of Arabic human rights testimonies, from witnesses to audiences via Amnesty International

Abstract Within the human rights knowledge production infrastructure, information undergoes processes of entextualisation, archiving, publication, and reception. This article examines the place of testimonies – first-person accounts of suffering and/or historic events – in Amnesty International. A network of agents form around testimonies to produce them through translation from the witnesses’ languages – spoken varieties of Arabic – to the language of globalised governance – written English – and to formal written Arabic. The co-construction of meaning, in encounters between human rights researchers and witnesses, is a modern ritual that is entextualised in the genre ‘testimony’; its translations between spoken and written modes, languages and styles, are exercises in persuasive rhetoric aimed at redressing ‘testimonial injustice’. The researchers are not professional translators, yet their unselfconscious translations are constitutive of the knowledge that audiences receive. The data is based on interviews and questionnaires with Amnesty International staff, textual analysis of publications, and on focus groups and surveys.

New results in Dead Sea Scrolls non-destructive characterisation. Evidence of different parchment manufacture in the fragments from Reed collection

Abstract This work presents the non-destructive spectroscopic characterisation of original Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS) parchment fragments from Ronald Reed collection. The fragments are of paramount importance because they have never been subjected to any treatment of preservation and restoration, this allows to investigate the manufacturing method of real original Jewish parchments. The manufacture of “sacred” Jewish parchments, in fact, is traditionally supposed to use a superficial tannin treatment. To study the DSS fragments, it was necessary both to analyse mock-up samples, especially manufactured in order to reproduce ancient Oriental Jewish ritual parchments, and to compare the results with those obtained in the analysis of modern and ancient Western Jewish ritual parchments, in order to test the effectiveness of the selected spectroscopic techniques. Traditionally, the main difference between Oriental and Western traditional parchment preparation consisted in the dehairing method: enzymatic for Oriental and lime-based for Western. Moreover, a finishing treatment with tannin was supposed to be applied on ritual Jewish parchments. The need of reference samples derives from the knowledge that each parchment preparation, treatment and degradation can induce structural modifications that affect the spectral features. Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy by Attenuated Total Reflection (ATR-FTIR), FT-Raman and m-Raman were used in this study. The experimental results allowed us to recognise, with different sensitivity, the presence of tannin by using m-Raman and IR spectroscopies and to prove that not all the archaeological samples were manufactured in the same way with vegetal extracts. Many salts (tschermigite, dolomite, calcite, gypsum and iron carbonate) were found on the surface of DSS fragments. They can derive from the degradation processes and storage environment before the discovery or from the manufacture. Moreover, the different sensitivities and instrumental characteristics of the used techniques permitted us to establish an analytical protocol, useful for further studies of similar materials.

Violent Sensations: Sex, Crime, and Utopia in Vienna and Berlin, 1860–1914 by Scott Spector

Reviewed by: Violent Sensations: Sex, Crime, and Utopia in Vienna and Berlin, 1860–1914 by Scott Spector Cynthia A. Klima Scott Spector, Violent Sensations: Sex, Crime, and Utopia in Vienna and Berlin, 1860–1914. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 2016. 285 pp. This work opens up with an excellent introduction to the premises of Spector’s study, that is, the juxtaposition of modern life in the growing metropolis at the turn of the century with that of the burgeoning violence and deviance on the big city’s underbelly. The world of fin-de-siècle Vienna and Berlin evokes a rather romantic picture of modernity. Culture was in the forefront of society, progress was viewed as a positive for Europe, cafés thrived with their intellectual atmospheres, and mankind was beginning to see the benefits from the giant leaps in scientific and medical discovery. But Spector’s work reveals the seamier side of this time period: the ailments of the large modern metropolis and the scourge of the underworld whose deviance and degeneracy had, for the most part, been ignored by modern convention. Though Freud’s work in psychoanalysis and the emergence of science and technology marked the positive image of the great metropolis, questions remained: What image do Europeans, specifically Central Europeans, have of themselves? How do the sensational and the scientific affect Central European life? What is one’s place in this “new” world? Spector uses Berlin and Vienna as the sites for his study, as these two cities proffer a rapid growth in science and culture ironically fed by the lurking degeneracy and deviance. Using social science, court records, philosophical and literary works meant for an educated public, popular culture, crime reportage, emancipation movement literature, and personal records of sexual and criminal subjects, Spector laces together a fascinating study on the “Großstadt,” not only a home [End Page 121] to high-level intellectual endeavor but also a haven for the decadent, deviant, and sexually degenerate underworld. Divided into six chapters, the work is devoted to explaining how scientific discourse was fed by studies in criminology, homosexuality, sexual crime, degeneracy, and identity, all of which fed journalistic sensationalism. The work is a great journey into how science was actually fueled by its studies of the underworld and sexology, resulting in new views on identity, culture, and image in Central Europe. In chapter 1, Spector discusses just that—opposing discourses of the Enlightenment and criminal science. His investigation into whether criminal behavior was viewed as a biological feature or a sociological product of society itself creates a fascinating look into the science of criminology. Shapes of the skull and facial comparatives serve to amplify the question of the origins of crime. Is it nuture or nature? Further, in chapter 2, the author explores marginal identity and how it relates to violence. Homosexuality, homosexual emancipation, and medical discourses on sexuality as well as social and sexual degeneracy are discussed in detail. Spector continues with further studies in chapter 3, entitled “Identical Origins,” in which cases of sex scandals are brought out of court records into the public eye. They not only become fodder for sensationalistic newspapers but also show the emergence of the formerly taboo world of sexuality and how it managed to merge with the worlds of society and politics. This segues well into chapter 4, where feminism comes up against Otto Weininger’s misogynistic work Sex and Character. Here the author provides a thorough discussion of prostitution and sex murderers, for which he utilizes police files and case records. Alongside Sex and Character, Spector uses Robert Musil’s works to explore violent fantasy, linking it to a critique of Central European civilization. The last chapter, entitled “Blood Lies: The Truth about Modern Ritual Murder Accusations and Defenses,” is a discussion of Jewish ritual murder and how it fits in with the modern metropolis in terms of modernity, enlightenment, degeneracy, race, and gender. As Spector writes, “If the modern central European cultural imaginary had an ambivalent relationship to its community of ‘internal others,’ this pointed to a self-reflection that is obscured by most interpretations of episodic anti-Semitism and the primitive self was as much...

Samuel Cohn Jr., Marcello Fantoni, Franco Franceschi, and Fabrizio Ricciardelli, editors. Late Medieval and Early Modern Ritual: Studies in Italian Urban Culture.

Samuel Cohn Jr., Marcello Fantoni, Franco Franceschi, and Fabrizio Ricciardelli, editors. Late Medieval and Early Modern Ritual: Studies in Italian Urban Culture.

Samuel Cohn Jret al. (éd.) Late Medieval and Early Modern Ritual: Studies in Italian Urban Culture Turnhout, Brepols, 2013, VIII-364 p.

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Late Medieval and Early Modern Ritual: Studies in Italian Urban Culture ed. by Samuel Cohn et al. (review)

Review(s) of: Late medieval and early modern ritual: Studies in Italian urban culture (Europa sacra, 7), by Cohn, Samuel, Jr, Marcello Fantoni, Franco Franceschi, and Fabrizio Ricciardelli, eds, Turnhout, Brepols, 2013, hardback, pp. viii, 364, 14 b/w illustrations, 4 b/w tables, R.R.P. 90.00, ISBN 9782503541907.

Envisioning Modernity, Practising Desire: Baby and Family Photographic Portraiture in Korea

Portraiture is one of the most common practices of photography around the world. Different cultures have developed distinctive types of portraits, from the post-mortem photographs of the Victorian era to the funerary portraiture of East Asia. Korea's unique set of photographic portrait types revolves around the stages of life: a portrait on the hundredth day after birth and the first birthday; family portraits on the sixtieth, seventieth and eightieth birthdays; and a portrait for use at the subject's funeral. These constitute photographs as rites of passage, commemorating the importance of certain stages in life, and such commemorative portraiture has come to comprise an integral part of modern traditions in Korea. The development of photographic portraiture as a modern ritual is closely related to intellectual movements led by Korean elites under colonial rule (1910–45); it was nevertheless under the military regime (1961–92) that family and baby photographic portraiture in South Korea truly began to reflect familial desires entangled with those of the state. During the country's ‘compressed modernisation’, a term used to describe the rapid, lopsided industrialisation characterising the military regime, the public began to appreciate specialised photographic practices that highlighted ‘modern’ family structure and values. This article argues that family and baby studio portraits, as ‘rite of passage’ practices, not only reflect the changing demographics of the population – the shift from extended families in rural areas to nuclear families in urban centres – but also promote a family model suited to the modernisation scheme of the military government.

The Rules of the Game: Forensic Medicine and the Language of Science in the Structuring of Modern Ritual Murder Trials

When ritual murder trials reappeared in central Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they could not be articulated in pre-Reformation language and symbols. Prosecutors, magistrates, trial judges, and police investigators shared an implicit understanding that a new universe of knowledge was in place in which academic experts and practitioners of science defined the boundaries—linguistic and conceptual—of plausible argument and were to be accorded deference. This does not mean that popular beliefs and understandings of Jewish ritual murder suddenly ceased to be disseminated or no longer influenced courtroom proceedings, or that zealous investigators and prosecutors did not pursue their cases armed with a priori assumptions about likely perpetrators and their motives. But cultural material, psychological predispositions, and even narrative accounts built upon eyewitness testimony could never suffice to move either the state to indict or a jury, or a panel of judges, to convict. Whatever nonrational thinking or prejudices may have accompanied it, the modern ritual murder trial was structured by powerful, if implicit, rules of expression and authority: it could only be articulated through the epistemological categories and idioms of a culture that understood itself to be both rational and scientific. What commands our attention, then, in the Tiszaeszlar, Xanten, and other modern ritual murder trials are the processes whereby ritual murder discourse bent—as it were—to the discipline of modernity, as exemplified by the structures and rules of legal procedure, parliamentary politics, mass-circulation journalism, criminology, medicine, and forensic science.

Music in Ritual and Ritual in Music: A Virtual Viewer’s Perceptions about Liminality, Functionality, and Mediatization in the Opening Ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games

Concepts such as liminality, functionality, and mediatization were clearly exemplified in the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. The fascinating use of the ancient practice of liminal integration of music and ritual in a modern mediatized performance illustrates both indigenous Chinese and contemporary Western performance theories. Despite the spectacular nature of the opening ceremony, however, it is doubtful that international viewers fully understood the complex messages communicated through this modern ritual performance.

Pulsa De-Nura: The Innovation of Modern Magic and Ritual

Every year as the fourth of November approaches, the majority of Israeli society and world Jewry recall one of the most devastating tragedies to take place in the history of the State of Israel. For on November 4, 1995, a Jewish zealot assassinated the then-Prime Minister of Israel, Yitzhak Rabin.' The scene is vividly etched in the collective mind, and the consequences are well known. Yet, what remains enigmatic is not the question of why the opposition wanted to prevent Rabin from pursuing his peace initiative, but rather the question: What motivated a fellow Jew to pick up a gun and kill the democratically elected leader of the State of Israel?2 This question takes on even greater significance when we consider that traditional Jews are obligated by Jewish law to observe an annual day of fasting called Tzom Gedaliah, which memorializes the assassination of yet another Jewish political leader, Gedaliah ben Ahikam, the Babylonian-appointed governor of Judah, over 2,500 years ago. Gedaliah's murder was the impetus for the final dispersion of the Jewish remnant in the Land of Israel and thus, Jewish spiritual leaders of the past decided to mark it annually as a day of fasting and selfreflection. Two and a half millennia later, the fast is still observed by traditional Jews, indicating how dreadful the impact of the assassination was upon the nation.: In view of the tragic consequences of Gedaliah's death, questions remain: How could such a thing happen again? What were the circumstances that created the atmosphere allowing such a tragedy to take place in our own time? As we try to uncover answers, we find ourselves involved in a multi-layered investigation. In order to understand the atmosphere leading up to the assassination, we must recognize that overall, anti-Rabin actions were undertaken by two types of political groups motivated by two distinctly different underlying principles.4 One group engaged in anti-Rabin

:Medieval and Early Modern Ritual: Formalized Behavior in Europe, China, and Japan

List of Illustrations List of Contributors Foreword, Joelle Rollo-Koster Introduction, Catherine Bell PART ONE. RITUAL AND GENDER Burchard of Worms and Female Magical Ritual, Martha Rampton A Princess Comes of Age: Gender, Life-cycle and Royal Ritual in Song Dynasty China, Ann Waltner PART TWO. RITUAL AND THE LAW Ritual Before the Altar: Legal Satisfaction and Spiritual Reconciliation in Eleventh-Century Anjou, Marguerite Ragnow Rituals in Medieval Business, Kathryn Reyerson The Judge, the Doctor and the Poisoner: Medical Expertise in Manosquin Judicial Rituals at the End of the Fourteenth Century, Andree Courtemanche PART THREE. RITUAL AND IDENTITY Graffiti and Ritualization: San Sebastiano at Arborio, Veronique Plesch The Triumph of the Abbey of the Conards: Spectacle and Sophistication in a Rouen Carnival, Dylan Reid Chanters at the Gate: Ritual/Performing Arts of Fifteenth-Century Japanese Outcasts, Eric C. Rath Jesuits and Ritual in Early Modern Europe, Michael W. Maher, S.J. PART FOUR. RELIGIOUS RITUAL AND POLITICAL LEGITIMIZATION Ritual Charity and Royal Children in Thirteenth-Century England, Virginia A. Cole Castrum Doloris: Rites of Vacant See and the Living Dead Pope in Schismatic Avignon, Joelle Rollo-Koster Rulership and Tibetan Buddhism in Eighteenth-Century China: Qing Emperors, Lamas and Audience Rituals, James L. Hevia Index

Travel and Aspects of Societal Structure: A Comparison of India and the United States

Most theoretical studies in tourism depend on the methods of illustrative comparison and case study. The limitations of the case study approach have lately been discussed. Like the method of illustrative comparison, it does not allow deductive development of theory. To rectify this situation, and to overcome the lacunae in methodology that Dann et al. (1988) and Nash (1996) complain about, the method of formal or systematic comparison can be brought to bear on tourism in various societies. In such a study, this paper compares two large, complex societies - India and the USA - and looks at the ramifications of travel. It analyses the institutionalisation of travel in a modern (US) and a modernising (Indian) society, including aspects of societal structure that are reflected in the language, and debates whether MacCannell's (1989) argument that tourism is a 'modern ritual' can be borne out. The paper concludes by looking at some of the theoretical implications and discussing the practical implications of the study for development of tourism in India.

Medieval and Early Modern Ritual: Formalized Behavior in Europe, China and Japan. Joëlle Rollo-Koster

Previous articleNext article No AccessBrief NoticesMedieval and Early Modern Ritual: Formalized Behavior in Europe, China and Japan. Joëlle Rollo-Koster PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Speculum Volume 78, Number 2Apr., 2003 The journal of the Medieval Academy of America Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1017/S0038713400170034 Copyright 2003 The Medieval Academy of AmericaPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Medieval and Early Modern Ritual. Formalized Behavior in Europe, China and Japan

Medieval and Early Modern Ritual. Formalized Behavior in Europe, China and Japan